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Hello! Hey there! It’s been a while. Looks like I have some clean-up to do here.

While I was busy elsewhere, I had a “grace illustrious” contact me twice about removing their name and content from this blog (‘CLITORIS, VAGINA, MAJORA, MINORA | The Ellipses Project’, 7.26.13). Done. I’m very sorry it took so long. May you live long and prosper!

It’s almost autumn! Last night was a full moon, something I try to capture every so often. No pic this time though–got distracted by other things–but I must say, it was a beautiful sight indeed.

Have you ever tasted snow on a warm summer breeze? Felt the sensation of crunching through half-frozen grass? The end of the year is getting close, and I can feel it now despite the lingering summer heat. It feels good!

Bring on Halloween! Sorry about the hyper, got a nice sugar buzz going.

So I bought this pepper jack #cheese at the #Walmart #deli counter tonight. If you look close, you can see that there is a second label placed over the original.

The $7.63 price on top is for some boring Swiss cheese that I didn’t purchase. Under that label is one for $6.63 which also shows the correct cheese, which I ordered and watched her slice on the spot. She obviously put the correct one on first, then covered it with this bogus one. If it was the other way around, I’d think she mislabeled it the first time, then corrected it. In THIS order, the only possible explanation is that it was intentional.

This is where it starts to disturb me a bit more. Due to the fact I would be taking this to a random checker and paying the “Swiss price”, there’s no potential for profit to the deli girl in this scenario. She doesn’t take payments, nor could she have something going with anyone else to profit from this in any way. Further, there’s no way she’s doing this just to keep inventory in line when she sneaks Swiss out in her bra since she’d just have a similar inventory shortage of pepper jack!

That leaves only one of 2 possible recipients of this switcharoo: Either the deli or whole store is scamming the company for bonuses and so on due to reduced “shrink” from sneaking this kinda crap in repeatedly to make up for employee theft, shoplifting, damaged items, etc. that normally factor into this rather important retail statistic. If it’s not this individual location (Walmart #5462, Vancouver, WA), then the other possibility is that Walmart is pulling this scam company-wide. Assuming they manage to do this to 1 in 4 customers, the extra dollar per 4 customers would make a hefty sum when they apparently have 100 million customers a week. That’s a lot of thievery.

Either way, Walmart, whether locally or worldwide, is training its employees to do things like this, and fuck us if we don’t like donating dollars to Walmart. This isn’t the first crap like this they’ve pulled. Several years ago a bunch of employees verified some suspicions that stores were adjusting shrink numbers by sneakily spinning the bag turnstile in such a way to guarantee lots of people leaving a bag or 2 behind.

You scored 36% I to E, 47% N to S, 33% F to T, and 53% J to P!

You are more introverted than extroverted. You are more intuitive than observant, you are more feeling based than thinking based, and you prefer to go with the flow rather than having a plan. Your type can best be summarized by the word “Healer”, which belongs to the larger group of idealists. You have a capacity for caring that is deeper than most. You strive for unity, are fascinated by the battles between good and evil, and can be something of an idealist. Only 1% of the population shares your type.

As a romantic partner, you are usually supprtive and nuturing, however, you have a high need for individuality. Harmony is extremely important to you as you are very affected by conflict and tension, which also makes you resist confronting your partner directly about problems. When you get angry, you usually blame yourself, rather than your partner. You can also be stubborn and unyielding when you feel you are being criticized or mistreated. You feel the most appreciated when your partner listens to you carefully. You need to be understood. You need to hear your partner express their feelings, the more often, the better. Your group summary: idealists (NF)

And something about working in a notebook frees me up to make this mess without worry or guilt. I can’t explain why exactly. I’ve tried to see if there’s a scientific basis that connects working longhand with uncritical creativity, but evidence for that notion seems pretty scant. The actual work of shaping letters one by one, though, seems to turn off the part of my mind that hesitates and likes to second guess. My conscious mind kind of goes away. I think it helps that I know my notebook is just for me, a private thing, almost like a diary. The work becomes a recorded daydream.

“This study shows no evidence of a correlation between low level mercury exposure and autism spectrum-like behaviors among children whose mothers ate, on average, up to 12 meals of fish each week during pregnancy,” said Edwin van Wijngaarden, Ph.D., an associate professor in the University of Rochester Medical Center‘s (URMC) Department of Public Health Sciences and lead author of the study which appears online today in the journal Epidemiology. “These findings contribute to the growing body of literature that suggest that exposure to the chemical does not play an important role in the onset of these behaviors.”

The debate over fish consumption has long created a dilemma for expecting mothers and physicians. Fish are high in beneficial nutrients such as, selenium, vitamin E, lean protein, and omega-3 fatty acids; the latter are essential to brain development. At the same time, exposure to high levels of mercury has been shown to lead to developmental problems, leading to the claim that mothers are exposing their unborn children to serious neurological impairment by eating fish during pregnancy. Despite the fact that the developmental consequences of low level exposure remain unknown, some organizations, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, have recommended that pregnant women limit their consumption of fish.

“The Seychelles study was designed to follow a population over a very long period of time and focus on relevant mercury exposure,” said Philip Davidson, Ph.D., principal investigator of the Seychelles Child Development Study and professor emeritus in Pediatrics at URMC. “While the amount of fish consumed in the Seychelles is significantly higher than other countries in the industrialized world, it is still considered low level exposure.”

… lends further evidence to an emerging belief that the “good” may outweigh the possible “bad” when it comes to fish consumption during pregnancy. Specifically, if mercury does adversely influence child development at these levels of exposure then the benefits of the nutrients found in the fish may counteract or perhaps even supersede the potential negative effects of the mercury.

“This study shows no consistent association in children with mothers with mercury level that were six to ten times higher than those found in the U.S. and Europe,” said Davidson. “This is a sentinel population and if it does not exist here than it probably does not exist.”

Day #5 is here, along with our final revisited and recreated recipe. I’ve really enjoyed remembering these recipes with all of you. I hope you have found one to try for this upcoming holiday weekend!

Our final recipe is my personal favorite of the week, mainly because it brings the most smiles. If you want to make a cake that will be a show-stopper at your holiday celebration, this is it.

This recipe was published recently, in January of 2013. It is so incredibly fun to make. I’ve made it 5 times now and each time I do, I love it more. You can color the cake layers, you can color the polka dots…endless fun possibilities!

It is not a difficult recipe, but it is time consuming and it requires a cake ball maker (or, according to my commenters on the recipe, a mini muffin tin).

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“If we had no speed limits or traffic laws, some people would drive like idiots, even more than they do now. If we had no age of consent, some people would have sex with children, even more than happens now. If there was no IRS, no taxes would be paid, and our country would collapse overnight into anarchy, a horror almost beyond imagining.

And if we had basically no gun restrictions…whoops. We don’t. And gun crime is rampant, and accidental shootings as well, and mass slaughters are becoming more and more common.

One political party in America wants to have meaningful regulations, regulations that would not infringe on the right to gun ownership any more than speed limits infringe on the ability to drive your car. The other party wants mayhem and murder, crime and terrorism, mass shootings, 5 year old boys shooting their 2 year old sisters, and they will fight to the death to keep as many of those things happening as possible.

Sometimes life is very simple: Democrats are good people, Republicans are evil. May the Force be with us, always.”

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Travelers are enjoying the spectacular Danxia Landform scenery in Zhangye, northwest China, on September 8. Zhangye Danxia Landform Park is located on the border of Nijiaying Village and Baiyin Village in Gansu Province, northwest China, having an area of 510 square kilometers. [Photo: Xinhuanet]